too loverly to eat

Cows playing football cake

I love being asked to make cakes that are a bit different and this one was definitely different! Trudy said she wanted a cake for her husband that incorporated his 2 loves – cows and football. With a cake like this, it’s not something that you can google to find a cake to copy and I had no idea what it was going to look like until I started making the cows.Trudy had initially asked for 2 cows standing on all four legs in the goals and 2 cows standing on their back legs in the middle of the “field” with a ball. However, I started making the first one to be in the goal and decided that they’d actually look better sitting. It then occurred to me that it would look more like a football match if one cow looked like it had been tackled and the other one was scoring – so I made one lying flat out with a sad face and the other with it’s “arms” up in the air and a big grin.I made all the cows in advance – they were all made using the same basic shapes as shown in the photo below. I made them out of white and then stuck on random black patches. The only other detailed that I added to them was a flower to show which team they were playing for! I assembled them by sticking all the pieces together using a bit of edible glue.

I made the fence posts the night before so that they were hard and would stand upright round the cake. I used the same marbled brown icing to make the writing (in the same style as the fence) and the remaining lump of brown icing was used to make some ‘cow pat’ goal posts! I also made the flowers to add a bit of detail. The cake itself was a cow pattern inside (or that’s what I tired to do!) – Trudy said it could be vanilla or chocolate so I did both. It was a vanilla sponge mixture – I put most of it into the tin and reserved a bit to which I added cocoa powder and a bit of black food colouring. I then piped blobs of the chocolate cake mixture in random places into the vanilla which was already in the tin.